After Driving & Watching Football Matches, Saudi Women Can Now Start Business Without Male Permission

Saudi Arabia is determined to change people’s perception to the country by opening up more avenues for women and going softer on their rights. Since last year, a series of reforms on women empowerment of Saudi women have swept the nation.

In a latest development, women in Saudi Arabia have been given the go-ahead to start businesses without the permission of a male guardian, the Saudi government announced.

In the past, women needed a guardian’s approval and had to visit a notary to document the founding of a company.

The move is a part of a shift inside the deeply conservative kingdom to offer more freedom to women and, more broadly, to reshape Saudi culture along more secular, modern lines.

In keeping with the spirit of modernisation, the announcement was made via Twitter. “No need for a guardian’s position. Saudi women are free to start their own businesses freely,” read a tweet posted by a spokesman for the Ministry of Commerce and investment, followed by a hashtag: #No_Need.

The #No_Need campaign is an initiative of Taysir, which aims to streamline the necessary procedures to establish a new business. There is no longer any need to visit a notary to document the founding of a company. With the introduction of the new system, all of this can be done electronically.

While Saudi women make up just a faction of labour force in the country, their participation in the economy is intensifying quickly.

In July 2017, the country’s Ministry of Labour and Social Development announced that women accounted for 30 per cent of the private sector workforce – a rise of 130 per cent over the previous four years.

Most Saudi women have mentioned transportation as a major hurdle to working outside the home. Barred from driving, the women had to pay drivers or rely on a man to ferry them to and from work. But in September, a royal decree announced that from June 2018, women could legally get behind the wheel. The announcement ended a longstanding policy that has become a global symbol of the oppression of women in the ultraconservative kingdom. The change is due to take effect in June 2018.

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Ministry spokesperson Abdul Rahman Al-Hussein told Arab News: “Women can practice all their commercial transactions in the Ministry of Commerce and Investment without a guardian or a notary.”

“One of the directives of Vision 2030 is to activate the role of Saudi women in society and to give them their full rights and the rights guaranteed by Shariah,” Nojood Al-Qassim, head of the Department of Personal Status, Family Legacies and Women’s and Children’s Rights told the Arab News.

The kingdom’s drive for modernisation and liberalisation is largely attributed to crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, who is racing the clock to deliver his Vision 2030 for a more modern kingdom with an economy no longer pinned to oil.

Saudi women can now also attend matches at football stadiums and an ancient ban on musical concerts has been lifted.

On 23 September in national day celebrations, men and women were spotted dancing in Saudi streets, a move previously unthinkable in a country that prohibits gender mixing.

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However, the reforms come with a dash of resistance from ultra-conservatives. While there have been flickers of resistance to change, momentum appears to have shifted. On the same day as the announcement of ease of women starting businesses, Saudi made another important announcement. In April, the kingdom will host its first-ever national card-playing competition, with a combined prize of more than 1m Saudi riyals ($270K / £190K).

Card playing has been banned in Saudi Arabia under religious pretexts. Immediately after the announcement, some Saudis took to social media to protest the tournament and its cash prize as gambling, which is forbidden by Saudi Arabia’s Shari’a law.

Despite the massive wave of change and reforms, Saudi Arabia constantly ranks as one of the world’s least free and least equal countries, particularly for women. It ranked 136 out of 142 countries in the 2017 World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap index.